From simplified content and mobile optimization to artificial intelligence and email’s persistence in being one of the most trusted and popular communication platforms available to brands and marketers, email marketing is going to be bigger and better in 2020.
Email marketing has successfully defied its detractors to continue providing a cluster of benefits to brands, from trust-building to generating some of the most incredible ROIs of any online/digital channel.
Living in 2020, it’s time to think and go mobile. Mobile browsing has categorically surpassed desktop operations in terms of volume/percentage traffic. For now, no other channels can match mobile’s share traffic percentage with respect to the majority of product purchases.
- Essentially, mobile’s percentile revenue has gone up by 23% every year, leading to more mobile optimization across every digital marketing platform out there.
- Similar researches show how consumers surf the internet and buy in the digital space.
- Mobile-specific changes have come through AMPs or accelerated mobile pages, RCS or rich communication services messaging, the steady rise in SMS marketing’s viability, and mobile-first interface and web design.
Most researches focusing on email open rates conclude that mobile is giving more email opens than normal desktops, reflecting mobile shifts across the vast digital marketing spectrum across the globe.
Beginning with the trends
If you want to have an email strategy than dominates the scene, start with personalization. In 2020, personalizing emails isn’t merely a nice gesture, but your subscribers and customers actually expect it. Your consumers receive an avalanche of emails daily. So, you need to implement personalization to make your mail campaigns a cut above the rest.
- With email personalization, brands apply marketing content and data from other platforms. It adds value to your consumers, making them more likely to purchase.
- Personalizing emails enable you to appeal to your customer’s unique interests and needs while guiding each on to the next phase of the sales funnel.
- It also drives superb results, boosting sales conversions by 12%.
- To prepare for the future, you need to make this process a notch higher by not just sticking to including customers’ names.
- Better data is also crucial. For an effective personalization of emails, you need to leverage data and content across marketing platforms.
- The data allows you to customize your email campaigns on the basis of your subscribers’ engagements and interactions with your brand across the web.
- These subscribers could include your Facebook fans or followers for Instagram.
- For example, is somebody downloads a manual/guide on your website, follow it up with an email that’s helpful and contains related details.
On response interactivity
Apart from user-generated content, interactivity is going to be a trend-setter in the realm of email marketing. 2020 could very well be the first year when you open more emails on your mobile than from a laptop environment or desktop.
- Considering that nearly 70% of mobile users are only going to delete the emails if you don’t optimize them, imbibing a multi-device robust and responsive approach is the sole way to update yourself.
- Fusing interactivity with responsiveness intimidates even the most advanced and experienced email marketer. In the past, you designed interactivity for entertaining the recipient.
- In 2020 and ahead, you will it in numerous other functional ways, fostering engagement and impeding subscribers from leaving your emails.
Some of the best interactive email components this year are calls-to-action and animated buttons, rollover effects to display product offerings, interactive product and image carousels, which the user controls, and UGC (interactive, polls and surveys.
Talking of accessibility, 2020 will keep witnessing the bloom of smart speakers using voice assistance to read emails to consumers. With tentatively 250 million such speakers up for installation around the world, modern email marketers are currently designing the base with accessibility features.
Focus on accessibility
So, the use of smart devices, smart speakers, and voice assistance to consume online content will only grow in 2020 and the near future. The latest reports say that at least 57% of US homes will possess smart equipment like Google Home or Echo by 2022.
Savvy and smart email marketers are thus positioning themselves for a paradigm shift in email content creation, bearing accessibility in mind, which includes the addition of CTAs (auditory). You need to know accessible content isn’t just beneficial for the concerned smart device operators/owners.
- Users with technical disabilities and visual impairments want content material that resonates with them permanently, even when covering marketing emails.
- Some of the key elements to make emails more seamless and accessible are semantic HTML, HTML tablets that only screen readers can interpret, images with Alt text, larger font sizes, and bigger line spacing and overall shorter content.
- The other aspects are proper text alignment, which includes a reduction in the proportion of center-aligned text and a clear visual order or hierarchy in your email content.
Brand stories and related authenticity will be very important. One of the most compelling email marketing trends is the use of modern, relevant content and focusing on the customer journey with each campaign. Throughout 2020 and beyond, content in emails will feature authentic messages and storytelling than regular sales content.
Regardless of your genre or niche, you always have a way to make your content more relatable and authentic.
The biggest and most serious disruptors
Brands are bound to stop building email campaigns because of automation and machine learning is going to take over and redefine marketing campaigns. Marketers have perpetually endeavored to send relevant emails by including the right content to the proper individual at the right time.
While it’s good news that technology will do all that on a scale you’ve never seen before, it’s also true that this new magnitude is far too complex and vast for individuals to manage.
With time, subscribers will manage to evade tracking or opt-out of it. Brands are making heavy investments in technology that help them in delivering highly personalized email messages. It’s breaking down the bridge between marketing platforms and forming a single view of the consumer, which results in the mining of Big Data’s deep pool.
